For All Sad Words

The Bend But Don’t Break defense is broke. It allowed a normally one-dimensional Iowa Hawkeyes team to pass its way down the field and kick a winning field goal with six seconds on the clock to quash the Nittany Lions’ national title hopes. The scoreboard told the sad tale: 24-23.

I get it. The Nittany Lions players and coaches love Joe Paterno so much that they want to keep him around forever. By ending the so-called national championship hopes, they have effectively cast in concrete Paterno’s intention to coach Penn State until the cow jumps over the proverbial moon.

We could nit-pick the game plan, the players’ performances, the officiating, and the weather’s effect until the Iowa cows come home. What good will come of such ruminations? We’re not coaches, we’re Sunday morning quarterbacks. Pontificating here about what went wrong to a bunch of masochists who want it rubbed in is not what I’m all about. You’ll get to reinforce your opinions about the crappy performance elsewhere.

Give the Lions’ opponents credit where it is due. They were able to capitalize on PSU’s errors and they stuck to their game plan. Their halftime adjustments were effective. Penn State’s weren’t.

In this Turkey’s family room, better known as The Cave, a conjecture was floated that Darryl Clark might not have fully recovered from the concussion he suffered in the Ohio State game. However, he did not look sharp in either of the past two games, even before his bell was rung. It is no coincidence that he never experienced the level of pressure he was subjected to in either of the ‘Eye games. (That’s Buck- and Hawk-…) He just looked uncomfortable back there, sometimes to the extent of being rattled.

We lost. It happens. Long after we’re done crying in our beer, we’ll remember this game just as vividly as we remember the 1999 Minnesota game. It is a turning point, but we know not where it leads. Let us hope that it does not herald the arrival of a second coming of The Dark Days.

Where to now? The focus must be on winning the two remaining games in order to grab the Big Ten championship. No head-hanging. There’s work to be done. A New Year’s trip to Pasadena would be a great consolation prize. Don’t want to go to Orlando or Tampa. Hell, I live here. Oh, I wouldn’t go to Pasadena, either. I already did that in 1994, and I don’t feel like intercoastalating this year. I’m just sayin’.

I wouldn’t have wanted to have been on the thunder making big silver bird that carried the Nittany Lions from Iowa City back to State College. The atmosphere must have been so darkly thick you could cut it with an Iowa hog slaughterhouse abbatoir’s knife.

For all sad words on tongue or pen, the saddest are these: “It might have been.”

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Comments

One thing that annoys me is all the people complaining “Why do we run 3 pass plays to start the game when we’re going into a 25 mph wind?”

Okay, let’s assume we come out and run the ball 3 times in a row and get stuffed. If that happened, then everyone would say “Why come out and run it 3 times in a row. I mean, the wind is blowing and it’s so predictable that we’d run the ball. We should’ve tried some short passes to catch them off-guard.”

Hind-sight is 20-20 and everyone will always find something to complain about. Personally, I liked the first 3 play calls. The problem is that they weren’t executed properly, and this was the theme for a good portion of the game (dropped passes, missed blocks, stupid penalties). First play, pressure gets in immediately (offensive line) and Clark overthrows the receiver. Second play, protection is decent, and Clark again overthrows a receiver. Third play, Clark completely blanks out and doesn’t see 2 defenders about to hit him and fumbles the ball. Again, I like the play calls, but the players executed poorly.

The only truly BAD play-call on offense that I can remember was after Williams completed a pass to Schuler out of the direct snap, we run the direct snap to Williams again and run it with him. At this point, everyone and their mother KNOWS we aren’t going to pass it twice in a row out of the formation. So what happens, Williams gets stuffed behind the LOS leading to us going backwards and ultimately leading to the interception on 3rd-and-24.

Another point on the last interception…Yes, it was a poorly thrown ball, BUT (and I hate to say this because I greatly admire Derrick Williams) I think Williams could have caught that ball. I watched the replay several times on my DVR, and as the ball passes over Williams head, he pulls his arms down seeming to think he was going to take a hit. I think if he had gone all out for the ball he could’ve made the catch, and maybe picked up the first down if he keeps his feet under him. Even if he doesn’t get the first down and makes the catch, we have about a 30-yard FG attempt.

Let’s hope Penn State wins out and doesn’t have to play Oregon State again in the Rose Bowl. Now, that would REALLY SUCK and it WILL happen if we win out and Oregon State wins out (assuming we don’t somehow sneak into the MNC). Oregon State is tied with USC for 1st place in the PAC10 and owns the head-to-head win so they would be the PAC10 rep in the Rose Bowl.

Yeah, you’ll always get a lot of that 20-20 hindsight stuff going among fans in the post-mortem of a big game, and it is obviously annoying. We’d all be great coaches if we knew in advance how each play would work on the field. However, grousing about a loss takes many forms and this is clearly one of them.

Although I have stated elsewhere (in the comment thread for the pre-Iowa post) that I won’t assign blame for the loss, I’ll state that my personal opinion is that passionless, lackluster play leading to poor execution was the main reason for the loss. Just watching body language and facial expressions was enough to convince me that many of those guys didn’t want to be there. While we thought that they had already been subjected to their adversity gut check, apparently we didn’t realize that they needed another one in another category: games against unranked opponents played in weather only a sled dog would love.

The pivotal interception would not have been crucial had a couple of receivers made a few easy catches. I have to wonder whether Quarless really belongs on the team after that. Two catchable balls dropped after all the off-field crap, coupled with the fact that he can’t block worth a damn, should at least get him demoted to third string. As for Norwood, I’d like to see a little anguish on his face as he comes to the sideline after a drop in a critical situation.

Passionless.

I haven’t used that word this year. I hate to see it and I hate to say it.

Although I too speculated on the comedy of facing Oregon State in the Rose Bowl, I don’t think it will happen. Chances are that the Beavers will lose to either Cal, Arizona, or Oregon, or some combination. All of those teams have more favorable schedules for the remaining games and each has two Pac-10 losses. USC, meanwhile, has a manageable schedule, with Stanford, ND, and UCLA. I’d love to see the Lions play the Trojans, if they could address a few obvious issues that emerged in the Iowa game.

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The Nittany Turkey is a retired techno-geek who thinks he knows something about Penn State football and everything else in the world. If there's a topic, we have an opinion on it, and you know what "they" say about opinions! Most of what is posted here involves a heavy dose of hip-shooting conjecture, but unlike some other blogs, we don't represent it as fact. Read More…